A great many media have discovered more or less the same thing. DVDs, books, audio CDs, movies, video games... they tend to have standardized prices
Well, they have standardized MSRP, at least. If the game is months old, I can buy it new at GameStop for $60, or I can buy it from an Internet store for $28.54. I don't mind paying extra to get a product from a store, but... good grief.
Movie ticket prices are more like downloadable games. I can get it as a download for $60, or I can buy a physical copy for $28.54. Seriously, the Playstation Network is now selling full retail games as downloadable titles, and these titles only sell at the same MSRP of the physical copy. As a result, all these games are cheaper if you buy the physical disc. Does Sony actually sell a lot of downloadable versions at these prices? Do theaters sell more than 10% of the seats? Looks like the same insane business model to me.
Indeed. I get annoyed when people still herald the clean and fundamentally unchanged design of the Google front page, saying the company is dutifully staying true to its roots.
Other than that pop-up in the upper right corner urging people to install Chrome, of course. You can indeed close it, but it shows up every time you use a non-Chrome browser.
Not to me, and given how popular it became and how badly the competition failed to dethrone it, apparently much of the world doesn't agree with you, either. There really is no other platform for making decent multimedia, except arguably Java. Apple hates both, BTW, just as they hate all virtual machines, like emulators.
I've always watched Flash cartoons and wanted to write oekaki software (an online paint program) instead of playing games or watching ads. Without Flash and Java, and HTML5 being something of a bad joke, there really aren't many options.
But then, I suppose this is the fault of the world for not making an alternative to Flash, and not Flash itself. If there were 3 multimedia platforms like Flash competing for market share, and all three had a few security issues, and Apple banned all 3 of them, would you be as happy?
I find it a bit odd that some of the people who support openness, most notably the Linux community, have been gushing over Apple and their tendency to outright ban things the company doesn't like. Don't like what you say but support your right to say it, blah blah blah.
So it is a walled garden. Well for some things I want to be sure that what I do is safe.
Then by default it should be disabled or not installed. Most people will use the defaults. By default, a sandbox and virtual filesystem should be in place, and the browser could simply not share cookies and other user data with plugins. There are plenty of ways to go about this other than, "Thou shall not use software except that written by us."
Sounds to me that you're less upset about Flash being available on your device, and more upset over the fact that many web sites still use it. Wishing for 3rd-party apps to be banned on mobile devices isn't exactly a solution.
Exactly how is the openness of Android protecting me then?
How exactly is the closed nature of iOS protecting you more? Do you trust Apple more than any other company to fix security flaws on day 1, given their penchant for secrecy? Why? Is this based on the company's reputation for fixing problems or the closed and limited nature of the code? Is Apple really more likely than anyone else to fix a security flaw in a 3-year-old product?
I think you're confusing openness with reputation. Just because 90% of everything is crud doesn't mean only 1% is good.
for no less than 90% of History the "creative process" has kept going quite good without such "protections".
For 90% of history we didn't have mortgages, property taxes, or otherwise had to compensate somebody else just for the privilege of existing. Living off the grid is essentially illegal.
I can't be depriving anyone of taxes while benefiting from the system if I wouldn't have paid them anyway, right?
Do you have any evidence that any of those pirates would have paid for a license? And that's the crux of the matter.
I knew quite a few Amiga pirates that bought games only if they couldn't find a cracked version. Going without? Heavens, no! They got their fix one way or another, even if they actually had to pay money.
Granted, that was in the days of having to dial into a network of BBSes and it took a couple hours to download a floppy disk. Piracy is obviously a hell of a lot easier and less time consuming today.
Of course, this is the computer industry we're talking about. Nobody cares about the last 30 years of history, especially when it comes to failed platforms.
When people get pissed off ENOUGH, then the Apathy will go away out of necessity.
Hopefully more effectively than one of those other countries in the world where people have been living in poverty for hundreds of years and quietly coping.
Personally, I believe that if America has a revolution, it will be rather civil. The one without massive bloodshed and tanks in the streets. The question is how much improvement we'll get. These days, social engineering is a science and we understand a great deal about human psychology, far more than, say, 300 years ago. There will be ways to take the New Order just to the limits of tolerance and no further.
Think less "war" and more "shell game". If a new GM can buy an old GM and still keep certain key people in charge, I would assume a government could do the same thing and still throw in a complimentary Peggle app.
Improper thermal management doesn't help. I have a Mac Mini that is normally quiet, but when the CPU is doing something intensive, the blower kicks in full blast and that little box sounds like a damn tornado. Really, it's hard to imagine that something so small can make so much noise. A hairdryer comes close -- literally.
Any device that has only two power settings for its fans, normal or full blast, is not what I call a well-designed piece of hardware. It reminds me of those leafblower NVIDIA cards.
It's pretty well known that Chrome = Chromium + other closed source stuff. I've been informed by some Chrome fans that the high disk usage is due to the SafeBrowsing feature, though I have no idea why that would end up reading so much information, rather than just downloading and writing anti-malware profiles. Since getting rid of Chrome over a year ago, I haven't bothered trying it again or doing any more testing. I hate the GUI and I don't appreciate the minimalist configuration options, so it's not for me, anyway.
I use SysInternals tools to keep track of I/O on my system, by the way. What I'd really like to know is if that disk activity involves spidering out of its install folder, and what it's reading. 20GB is a lot of stuff to read given that the install is supposed to be under 100MB, and it'd be awfully hard to convince me that Chrome isn't reading things that it damn well shouldn't. At least I tried it out on my gaming system and not my workstation.
I've done a lot of experiments with Firefox memory usage and extensions, and I've concluded that memory usage depends less on extensions and plugins, and a lot more on what sites you visit. I tend to surf image gallery sites, especially those that use a lot of JavaScript (such as Deviantart). After only 10 minutes of surfing, memory usage usually goes up to 500MB. After just an hour, not a week, I'm up to the 700MB mark. It might be the JavaScript, or it might be due to surfing through a hundred megs of images within an hour.
I just updated from 3.6 to 8.0.1, and I've seen memory usage go up quite a bit, even without extensions. Given all the hype about lower memory usage, and fixed memory leaks, I was surprised. Firefox is indeed faster, but memory usage is even worse than ever.
Why care about memory usage? The problem is that Firefox has always had issues with freezes every 10 seconds or so, and I presume it's due to garbage collection. The more memory Firefox uses, the longer the freezes are, resulting in interrupted browsing, typing, and lost mouse clicks. I ended up downgrading back to 3.6. The freezes actually lasted longer in 8.0.1 because the browser uses more memory. Until Mozilla adds some wait states into their memory manager, or otherwise fixes the regular freezes, I won't upgrade beyond 3.6.
Firefox also lets me move the browser cache and profiles to my hard drive or any folder I want. Chrome only supports writing to the same folder to which its installed. There's not much point to an SSD if I have to install applications to a hard drive.
When I tried Chrome, it read 20GB+ and wrote between 2-4GB every time I did a cold start. I ditched the browser very quickly. Aside from wondering what the fuck this advertising company was doing reading and writing so much data on startup, I wasn't going to let Chrome thrash my SSD to death.
I've since discovered that Chromium and Iron don't torture drives. Not only have I banished Chrome from my system, but all other Google apps as well.
In my observation, GPL fanatics are just more worried about a commercial vendor "hijacking" a code base and rendering the original project irrelevant. It's not about depriving people of the original project or failing to contribute, it's about a modified project becoming better than the original, so the original ends up dying. They may not say this, but that's what their behavior suggests.
This doesn't surprise me, a my observation of open source software is that it's largely driven by ego. People give code away for free, but that doesn't meant they're doing it for the common good. People can be very, very picky about what kind of work they do and what's important for the project, as opposed to what users really want or need. For example, the complete lack of standardization in the Linux community.
To an extent, I agree with this. I don't want someone to fork my project and not give anything back. However, I don't understand the people who insist that 100% of the code must be GPL. Sometimes you just want to work on something cool and not have to worry about the boring stuff.
I prefer to use multiple licenses. MIT for tools and scripts, and GPL for complete projects. Being a fanboy of one license is just narrow-minded. I don't care if people rip off my building blocks, so long as they don't try to raze my tower. Even if I can't take back the code they make, I can still learn from and build upon their ideas (assuming there's no software patents, of course).
To be fair, we were on an upswing for a while. I remember when every interface in the early 90's was getting icons everywhere, showing off all this newfangled Truecolor hardware. By the late 90's, things started returning to sanity and we started getting text lables again, most notably in the navigation buttons of Netscape (the new face of computing).
Ten years from now, good GUI design will be back. It's a shame we'll have to wait that long. There will always be marketeers looking for ways to shake things up, and it will probably be based on something that happened this year.
Anybody else want to imply hot design is just a cycle of fads?
Slashdot Mirror
I can't help but think of the TouchPad.
People knew it was being dumped, and they still flocked to the stores to get one.
A great many media have discovered more or less the same thing. DVDs, books, audio CDs, movies, video games ... they tend to have standardized prices
Well, they have standardized MSRP, at least. If the game is months old, I can buy it new at GameStop for $60, or I can buy it from an Internet store for $28.54. I don't mind paying extra to get a product from a store, but... good grief.
Movie ticket prices are more like downloadable games. I can get it as a download for $60, or I can buy a physical copy for $28.54. Seriously, the Playstation Network is now selling full retail games as downloadable titles, and these titles only sell at the same MSRP of the physical copy. As a result, all these games are cheaper if you buy the physical disc. Does Sony actually sell a lot of downloadable versions at these prices? Do theaters sell more than 10% of the seats? Looks like the same insane business model to me.
Indeed. I get annoyed when people still herald the clean and fundamentally unchanged design of the Google front page, saying the company is dutifully staying true to its roots.
Other than that pop-up in the upper right corner urging people to install Chrome, of course. You can indeed close it, but it shows up every time you use a non-Chrome browser.
No Flash! What a great idea.
Not to me, and given how popular it became and how badly the competition failed to dethrone it, apparently much of the world doesn't agree with you, either. There really is no other platform for making decent multimedia, except arguably Java. Apple hates both, BTW, just as they hate all virtual machines, like emulators.
I've always watched Flash cartoons and wanted to write oekaki software (an online paint program) instead of playing games or watching ads. Without Flash and Java, and HTML5 being something of a bad joke, there really aren't many options.
But then, I suppose this is the fault of the world for not making an alternative to Flash, and not Flash itself. If there were 3 multimedia platforms like Flash competing for market share, and all three had a few security issues, and Apple banned all 3 of them, would you be as happy?
I find it a bit odd that some of the people who support openness, most notably the Linux community, have been gushing over Apple and their tendency to outright ban things the company doesn't like. Don't like what you say but support your right to say it, blah blah blah.
So it is a walled garden. Well for some things I want to be sure that what I do is safe.
Then by default it should be disabled or not installed. Most people will use the defaults. By default, a sandbox and virtual filesystem should be in place, and the browser could simply not share cookies and other user data with plugins. There are plenty of ways to go about this other than, "Thou shall not use software except that written by us."
Sounds to me that you're less upset about Flash being available on your device, and more upset over the fact that many web sites still use it. Wishing for 3rd-party apps to be banned on mobile devices isn't exactly a solution.
Exactly how is the openness of Android protecting me then?
How exactly is the closed nature of iOS protecting you more? Do you trust Apple more than any other company to fix security flaws on day 1, given their penchant for secrecy? Why? Is this based on the company's reputation for fixing problems or the closed and limited nature of the code? Is Apple really more likely than anyone else to fix a security flaw in a 3-year-old product?
I think you're confusing openness with reputation. Just because 90% of everything is crud doesn't mean only 1% is good.
for no less than 90% of History the "creative process" has kept going quite good without such "protections".
For 90% of history we didn't have mortgages, property taxes, or otherwise had to compensate somebody else just for the privilege of existing. Living off the grid is essentially illegal.
I can't be depriving anyone of taxes while benefiting from the system if I wouldn't have paid them anyway, right?
Do you have any evidence that any of those pirates would have paid for a license? And that's the crux of the matter.
I knew quite a few Amiga pirates that bought games only if they couldn't find a cracked version. Going without? Heavens, no! They got their fix one way or another, even if they actually had to pay money.
Granted, that was in the days of having to dial into a network of BBSes and it took a couple hours to download a floppy disk. Piracy is obviously a hell of a lot easier and less time consuming today.
Of course, this is the computer industry we're talking about. Nobody cares about the last 30 years of history, especially when it comes to failed platforms.
Experience tends to do that.
Suck is like pornography. Hard to define, but I know it when I see it.
When people get pissed off ENOUGH, then the Apathy will go away out of necessity.
Hopefully more effectively than one of those other countries in the world where people have been living in poverty for hundreds of years and quietly coping.
Personally, I believe that if America has a revolution, it will be rather civil. The one without massive bloodshed and tanks in the streets. The question is how much improvement we'll get. These days, social engineering is a science and we understand a great deal about human psychology, far more than, say, 300 years ago. There will be ways to take the New Order just to the limits of tolerance and no further.
Think less "war" and more "shell game". If a new GM can buy an old GM and still keep certain key people in charge, I would assume a government could do the same thing and still throw in a complimentary Peggle app.
Hey, get into the spirit. It just mimics the theme of his front yard!
use smaller fonts.
luddites can ditch uppercase
Not only that, but using biometrics kind of implies, "One Password to Rule Them All." There's only one you.
I admit I re-use passwords here and there, but I have tiers of passwords, depending on the security required.
I don't even use the same web browser for surfing and online banking. Will I have to use the same fingerprint/retina/voice for all my accounts?
Improper thermal management doesn't help. I have a Mac Mini that is normally quiet, but when the CPU is doing something intensive, the blower kicks in full blast and that little box sounds like a damn tornado. Really, it's hard to imagine that something so small can make so much noise. A hairdryer comes close -- literally.
Any device that has only two power settings for its fans, normal or full blast, is not what I call a well-designed piece of hardware. It reminds me of those leafblower NVIDIA cards.
Or perhaps something like this?
It's pretty well known that Chrome = Chromium + other closed source stuff. I've been informed by some Chrome fans that the high disk usage is due to the SafeBrowsing feature, though I have no idea why that would end up reading so much information, rather than just downloading and writing anti-malware profiles. Since getting rid of Chrome over a year ago, I haven't bothered trying it again or doing any more testing. I hate the GUI and I don't appreciate the minimalist configuration options, so it's not for me, anyway.
I use SysInternals tools to keep track of I/O on my system, by the way. What I'd really like to know is if that disk activity involves spidering out of its install folder, and what it's reading. 20GB is a lot of stuff to read given that the install is supposed to be under 100MB, and it'd be awfully hard to convince me that Chrome isn't reading things that it damn well shouldn't. At least I tried it out on my gaming system and not my workstation.
I've done a lot of experiments with Firefox memory usage and extensions, and I've concluded that memory usage depends less on extensions and plugins, and a lot more on what sites you visit. I tend to surf image gallery sites, especially those that use a lot of JavaScript (such as Deviantart). After only 10 minutes of surfing, memory usage usually goes up to 500MB. After just an hour, not a week, I'm up to the 700MB mark. It might be the JavaScript, or it might be due to surfing through a hundred megs of images within an hour.
I just updated from 3.6 to 8.0.1, and I've seen memory usage go up quite a bit, even without extensions. Given all the hype about lower memory usage, and fixed memory leaks, I was surprised. Firefox is indeed faster, but memory usage is even worse than ever.
Why care about memory usage? The problem is that Firefox has always had issues with freezes every 10 seconds or so, and I presume it's due to garbage collection. The more memory Firefox uses, the longer the freezes are, resulting in interrupted browsing, typing, and lost mouse clicks. I ended up downgrading back to 3.6. The freezes actually lasted longer in 8.0.1 because the browser uses more memory. Until Mozilla adds some wait states into their memory manager, or otherwise fixes the regular freezes, I won't upgrade beyond 3.6.
Firefox also lets me move the browser cache and profiles to my hard drive or any folder I want. Chrome only supports writing to the same folder to which its installed. There's not much point to an SSD if I have to install applications to a hard drive.
When I tried Chrome, it read 20GB+ and wrote between 2-4GB every time I did a cold start. I ditched the browser very quickly. Aside from wondering what the fuck this advertising company was doing reading and writing so much data on startup, I wasn't going to let Chrome thrash my SSD to death.
I've since discovered that Chromium and Iron don't torture drives. Not only have I banished Chrome from my system, but all other Google apps as well.
In my observation, GPL fanatics are just more worried about a commercial vendor "hijacking" a code base and rendering the original project irrelevant. It's not about depriving people of the original project or failing to contribute, it's about a modified project becoming better than the original, so the original ends up dying. They may not say this, but that's what their behavior suggests.
This doesn't surprise me, a my observation of open source software is that it's largely driven by ego. People give code away for free, but that doesn't meant they're doing it for the common good. People can be very, very picky about what kind of work they do and what's important for the project, as opposed to what users really want or need. For example, the complete lack of standardization in the Linux community.
To an extent, I agree with this. I don't want someone to fork my project and not give anything back. However, I don't understand the people who insist that 100% of the code must be GPL. Sometimes you just want to work on something cool and not have to worry about the boring stuff.
I prefer to use multiple licenses. MIT for tools and scripts, and GPL for complete projects. Being a fanboy of one license is just narrow-minded. I don't care if people rip off my building blocks, so long as they don't try to raze my tower. Even if I can't take back the code they make, I can still learn from and build upon their ideas (assuming there's no software patents, of course).
Sounds like the same scam used in the health insurance industry.
Instead of asking, "Why do my math books cost over $400?", we are saying, "Look how much my iPad saved me!"
From the image you posted:
"very easy to see this line wit... (*obscured*)"
It's nice to see someone with sensible design experience can live up to his critique!
To be fair, we were on an upswing for a while. I remember when every interface in the early 90's was getting icons everywhere, showing off all this newfangled Truecolor hardware. By the late 90's, things started returning to sanity and we started getting text lables again, most notably in the navigation buttons of Netscape (the new face of computing).
Ten years from now, good GUI design will be back. It's a shame we'll have to wait that long. There will always be marketeers looking for ways to shake things up, and it will probably be based on something that happened this year.
Anybody else want to imply hot design is just a cycle of fads?
"You're holding it wrong."
Remember when high school teachers called 3.5" disks "hard disks?"
If people still have to explain this stuff on a daily basis, I think Microsoft isn't doing something right with their promotion campaign.
"Collision experience" is yet another term that does not need to exist.
I'll be really impressed if the OS will do nothing if the new file overwriting the old one is binary equal.
Now you have me thinking that this experiment will lead to us building another Earth in 100 years.
Too bad we would need more than paper-maché to do that.